At dawn this past Saturday morning, March 5, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high and reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet and flew for approximately one hour. The record will be part of a new NGC series called How Hard Can It Be? premiering Fall 2011.

Jaime Derringer, Founder + Executive Editor of Design Milk is a Jersey girl living the laid back life in SoCal. She dreams of designing textiles, running more than 8 miles + having enough free time to enjoy some of her favorite things—running, reading, and drawing.

5 Comments

Sophie on 03.09.2011 at 13:33 PM

ak on 03.09.2011 at 18:31 PM

I hope that’s not helium. Ironically, National Geographic published an article a month or so ago called something like ‘the $100 helium balloon’ about how the US’s non-renewable helium resources are being depleted rapidly. Currently the supplies are something like 1% of what they were 100 years ago. The article suggests hiking up the price of a children’s helium balloon to $100 to protect the remaining sources…..